A catchy beat-driven track based on the sounds made by top athletes looks set to be an anthem for London 2012.

It is the brainchild of Grammy award-winning producer Mark Ronson using samples of the sounds made by five international athletes while training for London 2012 as the beat of the song. Move to the Beat is the campaign for top worldwide Olympic sponsor Coca-Cola.

The song comes complete with lyrics from chart star Katy B and is billed as "uplifting track that fuses the sounds of Olympic sports with the beat of London music".

The grunts, groans, heartbeats, screams and pounding from training are all used as beats of the song.

Ronson, who said it was "no-brainer" to try to be involved, travelled to the athletes' home grounds to record them.

It was a bit of an experiment as he tried out different microphone techniques, was surprised by the sounds that he stumbled upon and kept them for the track.

Britain's Darius Knight, a 21-year-old table tennis player, from Battersea, south London, cringed and buried his head in his hands as Ronson told reporters that his "very unusual grunt" will now be immortalised in the song.

"Darius has this very unusual sound. It is great. Sometimes he uses it to put off his opponents and sometimes it is a sound of victory - to me it sounded like James Brown so I knew I would use that."

Ronson said he turned Kseniya Vdovina, 24, a 400m sprinter from Russia, into "the bionic woman" by attaching microphones to her ankles and different parts of her body to get the sounds of her heartbeat, her breathing and the noise as she ran on the track.

The best sounds from Mexican taekwondo star Maria Espinoza, 23, were "the screams and the grunts that she made when she was kicking the crap out of somebody", according to Ronson.

Dayyan Jaffar, a 17-year-old archer from Singapore, was also part of the project. Capturing the whistling sound of an arrow rushing past was achieved by placing microphones about 20 metres apart to record its flight.

The only athlete who has yet to be recorded for the track is Beijing bronze medallist David Oliver, 29.

Ronson said: "It was great because we had all this access to the athletes that people who normally record music for sports never really have - because you cannot have mikes around the field of competition.

"There were just all these great sounds as the wind went through the mike and, as I was doing it, I just got so inspired for what the track could be. It was much better than someone just giving me a hard drive of five Olympics sports and telling me to make it up from there.

"Listening to it all and actually seeing it gave me a much more personal relationship with the sports. It also put a little bit of extra responsibility on it to do something special."

Helen William
PA